Faith is a Telescope: The Ritualization of Vision in the Early Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson

During the 1830s and 1840s in New England a burst of quasire-ligious literary activity marked the beginning of what has come to be referred to ever since as “American Transcendentalism.” The central figure who shaped much of this unique cultural movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson. If Emerson's life is to be understood, then special attention should be paid to the critical importance that Emerson attached to his visual sense, specifically to his eyesight. It is vision that prompts Emerson to become preoccupied throughout his life with numinosity. Emerson literally “opens his eyes” to expressions of numinosity and “closes his eyes” when such expression is thwarted. Emerson's accentuated visual sense is described in this article. The argument is that Emerson's visual sense has clear psychodynamic bearing and gives rise to a personal strategy of ritualized vision. Such vision had important cultural significance during the nineteenth century insofar as Emerson's mature literary output articulated an American national identity.

In his analysis of the ontogeny of ritualization, Erik Erikson associates the “numinous element” with the first stage of his epigenetic scheme —the crisis of basic trust versus mistrust. He implies